Krishant007: Also, I should mention that one of the Apple Genius people in Sydney told me that I can use the iMac as a monitor - so I was planning to use the HDMI adapter to connect my PS3 to the iMac when I need to watch blu rays on there (or even play games on it).

That won't work on a new iMac, Target display mode is now a thundebolt only input, you will not be able to feed a source from a none thunderbolt device, (even with an adaptor)

Wow, that killed my buzz. Oh well, still not a deal breaker for me - I was thinking of using an external monitor connected to the iMac as well - will just use that as a monitor for my ps3 should I need it.

My main point for getting an iMac is the simple and clean feel of it; wireless keyboard and mouse, built in wifi, just one cable into the power socket (for times when I don't have another monitor at least). Enough power to do basic tasks and some advanced things - my MBP cannot cope well with image processing.

Initially I was going with a MacMini because it essentially has all that, but the 27 inch screen just took me by surprise and that is one of the things that I was sold on.

The nearest competitor to the iMac I believe is Dell XPS 27. Which is pretty much the same price for similar specs - can be picked up for about 200 less than iMac when on specials. But I think the iMac is a much better design. Also, I found that I needed to format my Windows machines every year because they kept getting slow. With Mac, I find that this is not as frequent.

One of the things I really liked is the fusion drive - but I am disappointed that users cannot upgrade that themselves - I would put a 256gb SSD in there before you can spell SSD. But oh well, you cant have everything.

Krishant007: One of the things I really liked is the fusion drive - but I am disappointed that users cannot upgrade that themselves - I would put a 256gb SSD in there before you can spell SSD. But oh well, you cant have everything.

iMacs have never had user serviceable drives, ( yes it was possible to do it, but the difficulty varied from version to version,) It may be possible to get at the drives on the 2012 version (current thinking is via removing the screen off the front), but until one of the websites does a tear-down we will not know,

Also You can turn the "fusion drive" off and just have the 128GB SDD and the 1TB HDD- its not an apples endorsed hack, but it appears to be fairly easy

I agree, but for distributing data to a group of people and being able to have ready offline access to that data the CD/DVD is far more cost effective.

These days such distribution is rapidly being replaced by services like dropbox and a myriad of other cloud services, - the end users just download and keep the file on their local machines,

Shiny spinning disc will go the way of the floppy, it is just a question of when......

Yes it will, but until everyone has access to fast and cheap internet, for the situation that I use the CD the CD will reign supreme. The group I'm talking about is widely dispersed some without necessarily having access to fast internet but need ready access to the information on the CD. This information changes every couple of months.

Handsomedan: I've had this conversation on another forum but thought I'd bring it here as I would like to canvass others' opinions.

The new iMac range is coming out in the next week or so. They will not have optical drives built in. They will be thin. They will be more powerful. They will be roughly the same price as the old ones.

Does it bother you that there will be no optical drive? Should you have to buy an external drive so you can either import or export media to/from discs?

Personally, the lack of optical drive in the forthcoming iMac range is the reason I leapt into the recent purchase of the "old model". No optical drive was a deal breaker for me.

Thoughts?

I went ahead and got the old model before they ran out. I have a Mac book air and an older 27inch Imac too. My specific needs is for a machine I can watch DVD's on and create video and burn as well as uploading CDs to itunes. Its not a do or die scenario but when left with the choice I'd rather have the optical drive built in and have a nice clean, tidy workspace.

The only time I use disks in my computers anymore is when I'm importing music from CD's for my brother who has a drive-less laptop. Otherwise everything is done via usb (Reinstalling OS's, transferring data, etc) or downloaded from itunes or something like that. My main laptop has a Blu-Ray drive in it, its never been used for anything more than a plain old CD, not even a DVD has gone inside it. Now that Apple has taken the step to do it, most other manufacturers will probably start doing the same.